Books and Literature

The latest release from Del Rey’s line of Star Wars novels is a quartet of short stories by Landry Q. Walker collected under the more-than-slightly cumbersome heading of Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Tales From a Galaxy Far, Far Away. I will call them Tales for ease of reading. The quartet is available only in e-book format, look for it online from your e-book seller of choice.

Each story in the collection features characters from the imminently released film. What’s fun and interesting in this selection of stories is the wide variety of genres on display. Walker’s four tales rely on and reference wildly different sets of tropes, from horror to Western. [Read more…]

Video game tie-in novels are typically of dubious quality. Shadows of the Empire was never great storytelling as prose or pixels. It came as a surprise to me how much I enjoyed Battlefront: Twilight Company and how grounded the series felt. Freed was clearly inspired by the long history of military science fiction and the hard-hitting reports of wartime journalism so prevalent in the last decade. What we get is a gritty, grimy, soldierly look at war on a galactic scale from the perspective of a boots-on-the-ground grunt. And somehow the book maintains the optimism inherent in Star Wars. It’s a refreshing look at Star Wars and brings to mind Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath in many ways – the action has an immediacy that pulls the reader into the world, caring about one character rather than the fate of a galaxy.

Johnny Rico, meet Namir

The novel follows Namir – a veteran sergeant of the 61st mobile infantry, Twilight Company – as he rises through the ranks during the darkest days of the Rebellion. He’s a jaded soldier fighting for the Rebel Alliance because fighting is all he knows. There is no patriotism in him, no love for the cause. As he is thrust up the chain of command he must grapple with his own doubts and whether he can serve the soldiers under his command if he is not a true believer. [Read more…]

-J. Michael Bestul is a writer for the Addison Recorder. Stephanie Ruehl is an artist who works in a comic book shop. They’re married and have a lot of discussions about comic books and graphic novels. Combine all that into a biweekly feature and you get “J. & Steph Talk About Comics.”

Today is the release of the deluxe edition of the collected volume of the Sandman: Overture. The Sandman comics were an influential and formative part of creating the duo of -J. and Steph, so it was only fitting that they discuss the final Sandman story, which is also the first.

the Sandman: Overture

words by Neil Gaiman, art by J.H. Williams III and Dave Stewart, published by Vertigo

Synopsis: it’s the story of what happened just before the sweeping saga that is the Sandman, where we discover why Dream was galaxies away and dressed for battle. [Read more…]

-J. Michael Bestul is a writer for the Addison Recorder. Stephanie Ruehl is an artist who works in a comic book shop. They’re married and have a lot of discussions about comic books and graphic novels. Combine all that into a biweekly feature and you get “J. & Steph Talk About Comics.”

It’s a very Marvel J&STAC this week, with a special appearance by Image. We normally don’t do back-to-back new #1 reviews, but there are a lot of them, one of which got a lot of media attention. You can probably guess which one based on this tweet from Kurt Busiek:

I saw a tweet saying liberals should create their own Captain America. They did. In 1940.

So, by now, you’ve all seen the trending topic on Facebook/Twitter/theonering.net/wherever. Basically, a Lord of the Rings fanatic cum architectural profession has, along with a bevy of colleagues/friends, started an Indiegogo fundraiser titled “Realise Minas Tirith“. Their goal – to build a living, working real-live version of the fantasy city from Tolkien’s epic trilogy.

I’m sure this has raised some questions amidst the neophytes and non-architecturally inclined. Fortunately, as the Recorder’s resident Tolkien scholar (insert grain of salt here), I can provide answers to these questions.

Last month Moroccan-American author Laila Lalami’s second novel, The Moor’s Account, was announced as a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In their citation the Pulitzer committee said that the novel was “a creative narrative of the ill-fated 16th Century Spanish expedition to Florida, compassionately imagined out of the gaps and silences of history.” That second clause ran through my mind as I raced through the novel a few weeks after its citation. The Moor’s Account is Lalami’s imagining of the famously doomed Narváez expedition to Florida that began with 600 Spanish conquistadors and settlers landing near Tampa Bay and ended 8 years later when the only four known survivors stumbled across some Spanish soldiers in what is now northern Mexico. Cabaeza de Veca would become the most famous of those survivors when his La Relación became the official royal account. Lalami, as you might have guessed, moves the narration from de Vaca to Estevanico, a Moorish slave owned by one of the other surviving Spainards and the first known African (and African slave) to land in what is now the United States. [Read more…]

Memory is a finicky thing. It’s subjective to an incredible degree, affected by a multitude of factors including personal bias, innate desires, and decaying human physiology. In short, every human being on earth has a different means of forming memories, as well as a different capability to retain memories. Some are treasured, and some are reviled. In the end, what we remember bubbles to the surface with obscene irregularity – and what we forget is often costlier than what we remember.

If that sounds convoluted, don’t read The Buried Giant, the latest work by acclaimed author Kazuo Ishiguro. If it peaks your interest, you’re more likely to find a thought-provoking existential treatise on what memories mean to our collective human experience. [Read more…]

Sir Terry Pratchett, author of scores of novels including the sprawling Discworld series, died yesterday at the age of 66. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2007, but continued writing, finishing his final book last summer.

Pratchett was a comic genius. Howard Tayler, author of Schlock Mercenary, held up Pratchett’s work as a hallmark of comedy, and said that there are some things that, if you don’t find them funny, you won’t find anything funny. He was a master of world building, creating the Discworld, a disc shaped world on the back of four elephants swimming through space on a giant turtle named Great A’Tuin, and populating it with a range of characters full of personality and foibles. [Read more…]

It took me a month to read all of A Brief History of Seven Killings. That’s not unprecedented, but it is a break from my regular reading habits. I tend to move from title to title with great frequency and if a book is taking me longer than two weeks the odds are good that it will get set aside. Sometimes a book is just too long to devour in that amount of time, but usually it indicates a waning interest on my part. So, it’s a strong compliment when I say that Marlon James’s epic new crime novel/mini-history/literary tour-de-force tested my reading resolve, but never broke it. [Read more…]

Made of Books is a monthly column (partly inspired by hero Roxane Gay) where Christina discusses writing that has been meaningful to her, in one way or another.

I first read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet at a time of transition. I had recently finished college and scraped together two part-time jobs to pay rent. Other kids had ambitions to go to grad school, or they were moving in with their partners, or getting jobs in their field. I had no field—only a undesirable history degree—and without school ahead of me anymore I felt myself floundering.

I wanted to make some kind of decision about my new adult life, to actively choose to do something to move forward instead of getting a job at a mall because I needed money and working with my friend would be fun. So I sought advice in book form. The page allows time and space to open up, and it was easier to feel vulnerable with a book because a book doesn’t know you, has no expectations for what you supposedly are, or for how you should be.